![]() The system of control behavior in humans therefore needs to involve processes that protect and restore conceptions of competence and mastery. In order to protect motivational resources for primary-control striving, individuals need to regulate their internal responses to experiences of failure and loss. Failure and loss of control may undermine an individual's motivation to pursue goals in the future. However, this capacity also renders humans vulnerable to the negative effects of failure on conceptions about the self. This capacity rests on the human ability to have long-term goals and on the ability to reflect on the self as the originator of goals and goal attainments. Particularly in humans, primary-control striving can encompass multiple steps and bridge extended time periods, such as in long-term career goals. ![]() For example, both children and rats prefer response-elicited rewards to receiving the same rewards without having to respond. This assumption converges with White's classic 1959 article on the motivation for competence, effectance, and mastery as a universal striving of humans and mammals in general. Striving for control is shared by a broad range of species and goes back far into the phylogenetic past at least as far as to those species that first acquired a notable flexibility in their behavior programs (Gallistel, 1990 Rumbaugh and Sterritt, 1986 see review in Heckhausen, 2000). This striving to produce behavior-event contingencies is referred to as primary-control striving. The most fundamental and universal motivational tendencies relate to this basic strive to control the environment, or in more specific terms, to produce contingencies between behaviors and events in the environment. ![]() In all activities relevant for survival and procreation, such as foraging, competing with a rival, or attracting a mate, organisms strive for control in terms of bringing about desired outcomes and preventing undesired ones. Control behavior directed at the external world is conceptualized as primary control, whereas control behavior addressing one's mental states, emotion, and motivation is referred to as secondary control. Control behavior, by contrast, encompasses behavior directed at producing effects in two realms: the environment and the inner world of the individual. Perceived control exclusively addresses mental representations of the degree of control available to the individual. Control behavior should be distinguished from perceptions or beliefs about control. The evolutionary origin of control-related behavior lies in the universal strive to achieve outcomes in the environment by one's own activity.
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